Sheng Thao is out there cheerleading downtown’s nightlife: all those cool bars and clubs and restaurants. In her opinion, downtown is back, after the gloom of the COVID years. This rosy viewpoint is shared even by some members of our CBO family, who point to all the new buildings lining Broadway and adjacent streets as proof that downtown’s best days are ahead.
Don’t count on it. With respect to Thao’s bars and restaurants, they’re limited to a few blocks of Broadway and Telegraph, with some along Franklin and Webster. Below 14th Street, all the way to Jack London Square, and above West Grand to Temescal, central Oakland is still a ghost town at night. And what about downtown during the day? Dead, dead, dead. Boarded-up shops. Dispensaries and convenience markets. Drugged-out zombies. Streets bare of working people. Even City Center is gasping for breath. Thao has nothing to say about any of this. As for all the new buildings, both those erected in the last few years and those still going up, they are not evidence of healthy new economic growth. Keep in mind that the time period for a new building, whether it be commercial or residential, is years, sometimes as long as a decade. The new buildings that now dot downtown were planned years before anyone heard of COVID. It was a time—2014-2018—when prospects for downtown looked good. Developers and banks invested because they believed corporations would move to Oakland instead of San Francisco (cheaper rents) and because workers would need more affordable places to live. So they built all those apartments in the Valdez Corridor and the other new residential areas.
Well, the most terrified class in America today is developers. They’re on the hook for all these new buildings; because of remote work, no one is renting spaces in them. The office vacancy rate in the central downtown core, around City Center, is a shockingly high 33%, while downtown Oakland’s vacancy rate overall in the fourth quarter of 2022 was the Bay Area’s highest, according to the Mercury News. In other words, far fewer people are working downtown anymore, which also means far fewer people are living downtown. Those new condos, rentals and office towers are just sitting there idle.
It’s impossible to see this situation improving. Sheng Thao can boast all she wants about our lively downtown nightlife, but Oakland cannot exist on the business taxes of a handful of funky bars and office buildings that are one-third empty. The truth is, Thao has no idea how to recover downtown. So let me tell her.
The only way to improve downtown is to attract big businesses. Downtown will not recover by being a mecca for little storefront mom ‘n pops, no matter how charming they are. We need to attract the Fortune 500 companies and smaller new tech startups, with their well-paid employees who can afford to buy condos and rent nice apartments and spend their discretionary income. This vision is the exact opposite of what progressives want, which is a poor, broken Oakland. It’s true that businesses are in a retractive mode right now. But this shouldn’t last. Sooner or later, inflation will ease, demand for goods and services will resume, businesses will recover, and hiring will again fire up.
But will businesses want to locate to Oakland? Progressives such as Thao love to say how wonderful Oakland is, with its artisanal, young population. But artists, musicians, bars, coffee shops, dispensaries, nail parlors and clothing boutiques don’t provide enough revenue to keep Oakland running: the infrastructure, police, fire, parks, garbage and so on can only be covered by corporate taxes. Progressives fail to understand this vital economic truth, or maybe they don’t have the intellectual capacity to grasp it. An artisanal downtown will be a poor downtown.
Any responsible mayor would clean up downtown, get rid of the vagrants and crazies, banish the tents, hire more cops, bust criminals, and tell corporations that Oakland is open for business again. But we can’t expect Thao to do this, because she’s progressive, which means: irresponsible. This is why Thao must be recalled. Big business will never come to Oakland as long as the perception is that this town is anti-business, with too many crazies, rioters, shoplifters, vandals and murderers, and a woke City Council and mayor that would rather play political games than solve problems.
Steve Heimoff